Re: Another View on Money and Credit

[GGard97342@xxxxxx]

In a message dated 01/02/2000 21:34:17 GMT Standard Time, hliu@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
writes:

> Scholars in the ``Critical Legal Studies'' movement in leading
>  British and American universities have challenged some of the most
>  cherished ideals of modern Western legal and political thought. Etcetera,
etcetera
>

4 February 2000

To Henry Liu

Tempting to follow this up but time will probably not permit.

But is any of it really an advance? Jurisprudence was one of my final
subjects at Cambridge in 1950, and the discussions were on much the same
lines. But even the Cambridge course was in many respects primitive compared
with Wolfgang Friedman's "Legal Theory", a superb work, as I remember, and I
wish I still had a copy. I read it while a schoolboy. Sadly Friedman was
killed by a mugger in New York.

The Cambridge lecturer in jurisprudence was named King, and when he could get
away from the curse of Jurisprudence (and most other sciences)
Aristotelian/Linnean classification, he posed the question "What is the Law?"
His discussion tended to the conclusion that the Law was what the judge
decided in a specific case at a specific moment in time and nothing else. If
the judge had overeaten the law could be determined by the state of the
judge's digestion.

King carried out a little experiment. He drove his car along Queens Road,
Cambridge, and when he came to the traffic lights at red he continued across,
in full view of a policeman. He was prosecuted, pleaded ignorance of the law,
and was fined five shillings. After accepting the verdict he asked what would
have happened if he had pointed out that the traffic lights had not been
installed in full compliance with the provisions of the Road Traffic Act of
1930. "You would have been fined ten shillings," was the answer.

I did badly in the law examinations. It probably was not only because I was
trying to do a three year course in ten months, but also because I disagreed
too often with the professors. I was wiser when I studied economics. I gave
the answers which were expected, not those I believed.

Geoffrey Gardiner